A Man of Parts (21 page)

He was not surprised that the story was a huge popular hit. It was in fact E. Nesbit’s breakthrough book, and she quickly consolidated its success with a sequel,
The Wouldbegoods
, and another story,
Five Children and It
, which had a different cast of characters. What did surprise him was to discover that the author was a woman. ‘I always thought “E. Nesbit” was a man,’ he confessed when they first met. ‘Writers who use initials instead of first names usually are. Like me, for instance.’ ‘I’m not the first woman writer to use that device to get attention when submitting work to publishers, Mr Wells,’ she replied, ‘and I won’t be the last. What did you think the “E” stood for?’ ‘Ernest,’ he said off the top of his head. ‘I hope I don’t seem an earnest sort of writer,’ she said. ‘No, no, quite the contrary,’ he said hastily. ‘It was your subtle humour that first appealed to me.’ Nevertheless he sometimes addressed her as ‘Ernest’ as their friendship developed. She was a woman who attracted affectionately mocking nicknames – ‘Madam’, ‘Duchess’ and ‘Aunt’ were some of them, inspired by a tendency to bossiness in her manner.

If he had invented the Blands as characters in a novel, he certainly wouldn’t have given them that surname. Edith was tall, statuesque and handsome, with a head of luxuriant brown hair, softly braided and gathered symmetrically at each side of her head. In youth she must have been a real beauty of the Pre-Raphaelite type, and although motherhood had given her a matronly figure in her mid-forties she could still in repose remind you of Rossetti’s languorously pensive maidens. She favoured long, flowing dresses in bright colours and wore a large number of silver bangles on her arms, each one given to her by Bland to mark the publication of a new book. She smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, with materials that she carried around in a cardboard box on which the name of a well known corset-maker could be discerned, and inserting them into a long cigarette holder which gave an extra theatrical flourish to her gestures. On occasion she would smoke a cigar. But she was also energetic and athletic, enjoying badminton, swimming, horse-riding, and pedalling a tricycle. He felt that in many ways they were kindred spirits. Edith was as prolific and work-driven as himself, and she too liked to write her quota of words in the early part of the day in intense solitary concentration, and then be free to exercise and amuse herself for the rest of it in company, the more the merrier. Like him she was impulsive, restless, easily bored, and subject to sudden changes of mood.

Hubert Bland was an equally idiosyncratic and larger-than-life figure, but it was more difficult to fit the various parts of him together to form a consistent, interpretable character. He had been one of the small group who broke away from an idealistic utopian society called ‘The New Life’ to found the Fabian Society in 1884, and had been its honorary treasurer ever since, but he was not a typical member. His views were a strange mixture of the progressive and the reactionary: he believed the Fabians should work towards the formation of an independent socialist party, and had helped Annie Besant organise the famous Bryant & May match girls’ strike, but he was a fervent Imperialist and opposed to women’s suffrage on the grounds that once capitalism was abolished they would not need the vote. He claimed to be a Roman Catholic and scrupulously abstained from meat on Fridays, but was never observed to go to church on Sundays. His appearance was striking, but verging on the exaggeration of caricature: the caricature of a choleric retired colonel, say, or a Tory financier. He was a big, burly man, with silver hair and eyebrows, but a dark, possibly dyed moustache above a rather grim, down-turned mouth. He wore a monocle screwed into one eye through which he would glare intimidatingly at anyone who opposed him in argument. He was not a man you would want to pick a fight with, for he was a proficient boxer and, according to Wallas, kept a rifle in his London home, with which he would sometimes demonstrate his strength by lifting it down from its rack using just one hand to grasp it like a revolver. He habitually wore a black frock coat and a top hat, and presented himself as a man of business, though on enquiry this seemed to amount to little more than his having once worked in a bank. In fact he was a journalist and essayist, and a good one, with a fluent affable style and a wide range of reference, and for many years he had written a regular column in the Manchester
Sunday Chronicle
which had a large loyal following in the north of England. He had collaborated with his wife in a variety of literary and journalistic enterprises ever since they married, but lately Edith had become the chief earner of the household in her own right, a change of status that Hubert perhaps did not relish, and countered with his blustering and domineering manner.

He did not really take to Hubert, but tolerated his foibles for the sake of friendship with Edith. The Blands were both about ten years older than him and had started their family earlier in life. They had four children: Paul and Iris, who were twenty-two and twenty-one respectively when the two families first met, Rosamund who was sixteen, and John who was three. There had been another boy, called Fabian, who would have been seventeen, but he had tragically died two years earlier after an operation to remove his adenoids. The two grown-up children were rather withdrawn, Paul in a diffident and Iris in a sullen way, but Rosamund was an attractive and outgoing girl, with a well-developed figure for her age. John was too young to show much character but was a promising playmate for Gip. He was looked after by a nanny-cum-housekeeper called Alice Hoatson, often addressed familiarly as ‘Mouse’, who was also a companion and assistant to Edith, and treated as a member of the family rather than a servant, going everywhere with them. In spite of age differences, the Wellses and the Blands had much in common. Both couples had achieved prosperity through the profession of writing, without the security of a private income or the benefit of a conventional upper-class education (neither of the Blands had been to any kind of university); both were sociable and gregarious, and both, in spite of differences on particular issues, shared the same broadly progressive agenda. But the Blands performed their lives with a flamboyant
élan
, and a bohemian disregard for convention, which made him feel that he and Jane were a little suburban and bourgeois in comparison. He didn’t go so far as to envy the Blands their style of life – it was too reckless and rackety for his taste – but occasional immersion in it added a welcome colour and variety to his and Jane’s existence.

Dymchurch, where the two families first met and mingled, was a pleasant, sleepy little village, sheltered from sea breezes by its low-lying situation and blessed with a superb sandy beach. The Blands had been coming there every summer for years, at first staying in lodgings, and then acquiring a cottage of their own. But to appreciate the full, complex texture of the Blands’ existence you had to know them in the setting of their London home. Not that it was properly speaking in London – it was in Eltham, Kent, and surrounded by fields – but London was creeping inexorably nearer, and it was connected to the metropolis by trains which stopped at a station that was conveniently close to the house and indeed named after it: Well Hall.

Edith, who had raised her family in a series of terraced and semi-detached houses like the Bastables’ home on the Lewisham Road, gradually increasing in size and amenities but always irredeemably banal, had found in Well Hall the house of her dreams, a dwelling fit for a writer, especially a writer of books for children. It was built in the eighteenth century of red brick, and now thickly covered with ivy – perhaps to advantage, because it was not a particularly beautiful house, but it was unique and built on a site of historical interest. ‘The original Tudor house belonged to the Roper family,’ Edith told him, when showing him round the property for the first time. ‘Thomas More’s favourite daughter, Margaret, married William Roper, and she is said to have brought her father’s head back here after he was executed, and buried it in the garden.’

‘Really? Where?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Oh, nobody knows,’ Edith said. ‘Why are you so interested?’

‘I’ve been reading More’s
Utopia
,’ he said. ‘I’m planning to write a modern Utopia, and I’ve been looking at the classic examples. More’s is easily the best.’

‘And we have a ghost,’ said Edith.

‘Of course!’ he said. ‘What would a place like this be without a ghost? Like a modern house without plumbing.’

‘Actually I wouldn’t mind having some modern plumbing installed in Well Hall,’ she said. ‘But we’ve already spent a fortune making the place habitable. It was terribly dilapidated when we bought it.’

‘And the ghost? Is it Thomas More looking for his head?’

‘No. It may be Margaret. She – I’m sure it’s a she – plays the spinet very quietly in the next room – it’s always the
next
room, no matter which room you are in yourself. But she’s not at all frightening. Sometimes when I’m working very intensely I hear a faint sigh, and I have a sense she’s looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing, but when I look round there’s nobody there.’

‘And is it a sigh of satisfaction or a sigh of disappointment?’

‘Sometimes one and sometimes the other.’

‘It’s probably a projection of your own feelings about your work at the time.’

‘Yes, I thought you would say that. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’

‘No, but I recognise their usefulness to writers of fiction,’ he said.

Well Hall was three storeys high, and had a rickety balcony at the back overlooking a garden large enough to accommodate tennis and badminton, and surrounded on three sides by a moat, which afforded swimming and punting in summer and skating on frosty days in winter. There were shrubberies beyond the moat, two huge cedars where owls perched and hooted, an overgrown orchard, and outhouses which were used to accommodate guests when the bedrooms in the house were full up, for the Blands entertained on a large scale. Those invited to dinner came down by railway from Cannon Street, changing at Blackheath, and often missed the last train back, either because the meal started late or because they were enjoying the subsequent entertainments – dancing, charades, dumb crambo, devil-in-the-dark – too much to tear themselves away. If you were invited for the weekend it was advisable to catch an early train down and bag a bedroom before the main party arrived. Dinner was served on a long table in the great hall behind the front door, so this was kept locked and visitors were greeted with a notice saying ‘The Front Door is at the Back.’ On Sunday evenings there were regular political symposia at which speakers like the Chesterton brothers and Hilaire Belloc would debate with Shaw and Bland and younger Fabians before an audience of up to forty people.

Sometimes he observed signs of concern on Bland’s part at the cost of all this hospitality, but since it was Edith’s boom that was funding it, there was no way he could object. She loved playing the generous hostess, and was always attended by one or more adoring young men. How platonic these relationships were was a matter for speculation and gossip. She was rumoured to have had a passionate affair years ago with the poet Richard Le Gallienne, threatening to run away with him after a row with Bland, and according to Wallas she was before that in love for a time with Bernard Shaw. ‘I think he reciprocated up to a point,’ said Wallas, ‘because he was aware that Bland was not the most faithful of husbands, but he didn’t want to get deeply involved. She pursued him though. She used to waylay him at the British Museum, and he managed to keep her out of his lodgings only by leading her on exhausting walks around London.’ Bland was still a far from faithful husband to judge by the Fabian gossip about him, though how he reconciled this behaviour with his public pronouncements on sexual morals was one of the many enigmas of the man’s character. One way and another it was a highly unconventional household, and he often wondered with amusement what the eager purchasers of E. Nesbit’s tales about the children of respectable middle-class mummies and daddies would think if they wandered into Well Hall and observed the authoress presiding over one of her parties.

In 1904 Edith had another great hit with
The Phoenix and the Carpet
, brought out as usual just in time for the Christmas trade. It added a new dimension to her work in seamlessly combining the fantastic with the recognisably real – more deftly, he had to admit, than
The Sea Lady
. He wrote a letter, jocularly addressed to ‘
Steamed Madam
,’ of sincere congratulation: ‘
Go on every Xmas never missing a Xmas, with a book like this, and you will become a British Institution in six years from now. Nothing can stop it. Every self-respecting family will buy you automatically and you will be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and I knock my forehead on the ground in the vigour of my admiration at your easy artistry
.’

He himself had just completed, with some difficulty, a novel in the Dickensian mode of comic realism entitled
Kipps
, with which he had been struggling on and off for several years. It was really the story of his own life as it might have been if he had lacked talent, intelligence and willpower. Arthur Kipps, like Bertie Wells, was a miserably unhappy apprentice in a seaside draper’s shop with no hope of escaping from a life of penurious drudgery by his own efforts. An unexpected legacy enabled him to assume the life of a gentleman, but without the benefit of a proper education or any innate gifts he proved quite incapable of playing the part, and was exploited and humiliated by the genteel people with whom he now mixed. At one point in the composition of this novel he had intended Kipps to be converted to socialism and find redemption in that, but as he became increasingly involved in the political debates of the Fabian it became more and more difficult to fuse that kind of discourse with the genially comic authorial voice of the book he was writing. Over the same period he was working on
A Modern Utopia
, a much more appropriate vehicle for his own political thinking, so he decided that Arthur Kipps should find happiness in the end by marrying a servant girl and settling down to run a small bookshop. When he sent off the manuscript to his agent Pinker he admitted that the last section of the novel was ‘
scamped … a thing of shreds and patches, but it is quite handsomely brought off
’. He was confident that the first two-thirds were better than anything else he had written in that mode, and certainly funnier; and he believed that once you had your readers well and truly hooked, they would forgive many faults. Pinker’s reaction confirmed this, and the book was promptly accepted by Macmillan for publication in the autumn of 1905.